In the Denver metro area, it’s not unusual for a snow storm to arrive before autumn has a chance to hit full stride. All it takes is a quick-moving cold front shuddering down the mountains to turn a bright, warm afternoon into a “grab your woolies” night. Fortunately, Colorado is also one of the sunniest states in the country, so early October snow has a tendency to melt off quickly at lower elevations. Still, one snow storm or below freezing day will inevitably take out my heat-loving plants and vegetables while they are still in their prime.
Our first snowstorm of the season rolled in last Sunday, and I quickly picked as much of the produce as I could from the garden. After covering the carrots with new garden bed fabric, I bid farewell to summer’s backyard bounty. The next day the tomato plants’ once perky branches tilted toward the earth as if sucker punched, the garden's signal that it was time to start planning how best to put it to bed for the winter.
With only carrots left to mature and a small garlic patch overwintering under an ample thatch of straw in another direct-sun raised bed, Cameron and I have spent a little time each day this week tidying our backyard so that next growing season we’ll be ready to plant as soon as possible.
Below you’ll find a few helpful tips we've relied on this autumn to winterize our Colorado growing spaces.
For Compact Yards, Get Raking.
If you have acreage and/or live in a temperate climate, you can likely reap the benefits of mowing your leaves and leaving them to break down into compost over the winter. For those of us in high, dry climates with minimal grass, the single best gift you can give yourself now to save landscaping work next spring is to rake and bag leaves that have fallen in your small yard.
You’ll be gathering excellent “brown” material to add to your compost bin and prevent bare patches in your lawn because of matted leaves sitting on the grass over the winter. Last year, we were so consumed with keeping a baby alive and happy that we neglected raking until the spring. I took comfort in the fact that leaves could fall where they fall. It's what nature intended.
But a landscaped yard is not truly a wild space. In Colorado, if you're aiming for even a naturally fertilized grassy area in your yard, leaving the leaves to do as nature intended is not particularly helpful. Not only had the leaves transformed into a gloppy mess after months of slow decomposition, but they had not decomposed enough to actually become a useful compost, instead adding another barrier to keep water from reaching the roots of the grass.
We learned our lesson this spring. While we don’t have a huge lawn, we do want what we have to be healthy and to not rely on chemical fertilizers to keep up the appearance of "health." It's been well-documented around these parts that chemical fertilizers on our lawns travel as water runoff out to our local waterway, the South Platte River. Home gardeners and landscapers aren't helping the situation by relying on chemical fertilizers to artificially pump up the green in their lawn. The chemically reliant unhealthy grass stays stuck in a loop of needing chemical inputs along with so much water to keep it kicking.
Healthy grass not only uses less water, but it also serves as an amazing dust queller. In a land of little rain, keeping the dust in check around our house means less dust collecting on all my belongings indoors and in my lungs when I open my window for fresh air.
Over the weekend, strong winds rattled off about half the leaves from our trees. I raked
up a few bags today to make the next raking event less overwhelming.
Encourage a Healthy Lawn With Aeration and Compost.
If you're worried about your grass struggling without a chemical fertilizer, don't be. Toss that bag of chemicals, and aim to aerate your lawn this fall and next spring. If your landscaping includes grass, aerate the lawn in the fall and spring and broadcast compost after each aeration.
I had never heard of lawn aeration before moving to Colorado. I'm sure it's a thing elsewhere, but this is the first yard I've owned and landscaped. In my Alabama homeplace, I spent most of my middle and high school years helping my parents beat back the grassy wilderness through day-long grass-mowing sessions.
In the Denver metro area, dry, dense clay soil is a pain to grow veggies in (which is why I’m a firm believer in raised bed gardening!), and it’s challenging to grow healthy, low-water lawns because water has a hard time permeating the soil’s surface. (I love clay pottery, but I wasn’t expecting my entire yard to be a gigantic clay plate.)
To give your grass a chance to hibernate and come back healthier (and therefore more capable of surviving dry summer conditions without constant water waste), plug aeration is the way to go. You can rent an aeration machine from a home improvement store, but it may be more cost-effective to pay someone to aerate with his or her machine. We spent about $40 for the aeration a few weeks ago and applied our own compost.
Pick and Choose Perennials to Prune.
I'm now a firm believer in leaving habitat for our local critters and insects to use over the winter. I used to cut back all my perennials each autumn, removing any dead leaves or stems, partly because I wanted a "tidy" appearance. Now, I focus on clearing dead annuals from beds and selecting the most unwieldy perennials for a pruning. I also used to apply mulch as soon as the weather turned cold am much more laid back now that some of the dead leaves and stems of perennials serve as a natural insulation and nesting spot for critters who need warmth in the winter.
That said, if you have diseased plants or insect infestations on any plant leaves or stems, remove the damaged foliage and potentially the entire plant to avoid problems next growing season.
Clear Raised Garden Bed Annuals and Fallen Fruit and Vegetables.
I’m all for the unexpected volunteer plant that pops up in the garden. This year, we had six volunteer tomatillo plants grow from seeds that must have been unintentionally sowed from dropped fruit. However, the plants didn’t produce enough fruit to make anything with them, so we wound up nursing plants that used nutrients and water that could have been allocated for more productive crops.
Additionally, fallen fruits and vegetables can attract pests who decide the eating’s good in your garden. Like an unwanted house guest, pests like the infamous brown squirrel or the sometimes ravenous but always destructive neighborhood raccoon are opportunistic little boogers. Unwittingly provide them with your leftovers, and they’ll be ripping out your newly transplanted peas and strawberries the following spring.
Just as important, though less immediately noticeable, are the small insect pests, like aphids or cabbage worms, and the plant diseases that may take up residence in garden debris in your beds. To reduce your pest battles next summer, clear dead plants, leaves, and decomposing produce from the garden.
Add Compost to Garden Beds.
October in Colorado is a great time to apply compost to your vegetable garden beds. Our long winter gives compost time to settle in to the soil, with the added benefit of periodic snow melt, which helps compost nutrients to integrate into the soil and save time for planting in the spring.
Move Container Perennial Herbs Indoors.
Find a sunny spot indoors and relocate your delicious herbs from outside so that they will survive Colorado’s extreme winter temperature fluctuations. I have two pots of chives, a pot of French thyme, and a large potted mint plant that now live in our house’s sunny back addition. I’m already planning a minty mojito party to help me endure the inevitable March snows.
What are your annual rituals for putting your garden to bed this time of year?